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Windows 7: Change to 'Bios' will make for PCs that boot in seconds

The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initializes a machine so its operating system can get going.
The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up.
Bios' replacement, known as UEFI, will predominate in new PCs by 2011.
The acronym stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and is designed to be more flexible than its venerable predecessor.

Unless I'm sorely misinformed, EFI is a HDD partition. In my experience with MACs, which have been using EFI and the GUID partition table for years, UEFI makes it much more difficult to replace a HDD, as the EFI image for the target system has to written the the HDD prior to installation. When the EFI partition is lost or corrupted, the entire system is rendered unusable. In other words once this happens, people who only have one computer will be no longer be able to reinstall an operating system on their own if they don't have a cloned HDD, in the case of total HDD failure. On the other hand, it does make for a more efficient boot time, and a much more visually appealing BIOS menu.

Unless I'm sorely misinformed, EFI is a HDD partition. In my experience with MACs, which have been using EFI and the GUID partition table for years, UEFI makes it much more difficult to replace a HDD, as the EFI image for the target system has to written the the HDD prior to installation. When the EFI partition is lost or corrupted, the entire system is rendered unusable. In other words once this happens, people who only have one computer will be no longer be able to reinstall an operating system on their own if they don't have a cloned HDD, in the case of total HDD failure. On the other hand, it does make for a more efficient boot time, and a much more visually appealing BIOS menu.

Sorry for my ignorance/confusion, Dan. Are you saying a system image won't work and I'd need to keep an additional cloned HDD around the house in case the original crashes?

Unless I'm sorely misinformed, EFI is a HDD partition. In my experience with MACs, which have been using EFI and the GUID partition table for years, UEFI makes it much more difficult to replace a HDD, as the EFI image for the target system has to written the the HDD prior to installation. When the EFI partition is lost or corrupted, the entire system is rendered unusable. In other words once this happens, people who only have one computer will be no longer be able to reinstall an operating system on their own if they don't have a cloned HDD, in the case of total HDD failure. On the other hand, it does make for a more efficient boot time, and a much more visually appealing BIOS menu.

If that is the case, I'll keep my BIOS.

Edit: Here is an article from 2007 about Intel going to it and Apple's adoption of it.

Sorry for my ignorance/confusion, Dan. Are you saying a system image won't work and I'd need to keep an additional cloned HDD around the house in case the original crashes?

You would at the very least have to clone the EFI partition & use gParted or something similar to move it to the new HDD if you needed to replace a HDD. EFI will include a partition editor for setting up the HDD for the operating system, but my experience with EFI and MACs is that if the EFI partition becomes corrupted or accidentally erased, an OS (but not OS-X) can sometimes be installed using the DVD drive, but at the very least, none of the the hardware that isn't registered in CMOS will work, nor can it be enabled simply by and downloading and installing drivers. The other problem with EFI systems is that they can't be booted from USB unless it's a USB port that's integrated with the motherboard. It could be that MACs are deliberately designed that way, as Steve Jobs once said MACs will never be bootable from USB, but I think it's likely that he said that because there is no way to make it possible.

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